telecommunications

Tom Keating has a blog post about Google's VoIP Plans. (Cue the Dr. Evil laugh). What Google is trying to do, according to Google VP of Product Management, Bradly Horowitz's hints at their future roadmap when he said, "What we're trying to do with telephony is give people a seamless experience that frees up their telephony communication from the silos where it's lived for the last decade. Voicemail, my contacts, all of those things have been segregated from the rest of my Web experience.

While at the Microcorp One-on-One event I had a chance to sit down with the president of ACC Business, JD Baker. We talked about the changes in the portfolio in 2009 (now that all the Baby Bells have transformed back into Ma Bell).

Baker thinks that the second half of 2009 will be stronger, since the first half of 2009 was kind of soft.

The next strong service will be Ethernet. EaMIS utilizes Ethernet transport to establish connectivity for a customer for managed internet service. This was rolled out in 2009 - at very competitive pricing - at a time when businesses were looking for Ethernet in place of TDM. (Businesses growing out of Broadband are used to a Cat5 hand-off and inexpensive switches).

There are a bunch of debates raging over the telecommunications infrastructure.

Congress has looked at Open Access bills for cellular networks. By this we mean that a consumer can use any available handset or device on any cell network. This is kind of the Carterphone concept for cellular.

The 700 MHz auction had open access provisions built right in, so VZW's 4G/LTE network will need to incorporate Open Access.

Spectrum is a finite resource. TV, radio, public safety and the cell companies all share access to various licensed spectrums.

In a discussion on twitter with @DougonIPcomm (that Doug blogged here), Doug is promoting the idea that HD Voice is here so buy the cheap HD Voice handsets from Polycom and Cisco now. I think he missed my point.

Doug points to Xconnect, Simple Signal, Apteva and Sprint as examples of HD inter-connected ITSP. Big deal. There are 1100 VoIP Providers in the US alone. many not inter-connected with anyone but the PSTN.

To enjoy true HD Voice calling both sides of the call have to be SIP (supporting G.722).

On a listserv today, I replied to a wholesale account exec at a reseller that had just plugged his service to the list. In the reply, I said "that's one way to pimp your product" then went on to explain that he missed the point of the original email -- and in fact doesn't quite get the goal of the membership of that list/group.

Well, the AE got offended and pinged me offlist. I always say "pimping your stuff". Let's face it: in telecom most everyone is pitching and selling and pushing a commodity. Not much original stuff (except maybe fiber guys).